Hey, guys. It's Chelsea, and
this week's video is brought to you by
my visceral disgust at having to look at LuLaRoe
leggings for four hours. As you can tell by our title,
thumbnail, and intro today, I'm just going to be giving you
my essentially unfiltered rant after having watched the
four-part Amazon LuLaRoe documentary, LuLaRich, all
in one sitting last night. Anyone who's watched
even a second of TFD knows how we feel about MLMs,
which is badly, negatively. We don't stan. And LuLaRoe, for anyone who was
near Facebook over the past six years, has been one of the
most ubiquitous MLM offenders. At least Rodan + Fields makes an
attempt to make their skin care products look chic. What the fuck are
these leggings? For those who may not know,
though, an MLM is essentially a hair's breath away
from a pyramid scheme and many would argue have
basically no real differences, but the theory is that the
organization forms a pyramid shape in which people
make money by bringing in other people underneath
them to represent the company, usually having
exorbitant startup fees or having to buy a
ton of inventory. The money is generally
not actually made from selling their
goods or services. It's made from roping other
people into the scheme. But if you want any more
information on what MLMs are, who they're targeting,
why they're everywhere on your Instagram depending
on your demographic makeup, we'll link you in
the description to some of our greatest
hit videos on the subject. But I want to talk specifically
about this documentary, LuLaRoe itself, and what I
feel is a pretty under-explored aspect of the MLM phenomenon. The LuLaRich
documentary essentially takes us from the origins of
this company all through what it is currently at now,
which basically appears to be a husk of its former self
that is being sued every which way from Sunday, I can't imagine
has much of a functional staff left, but somehow keeps
posting their atrocious clothes on Instagram. So I guess, go, girl. Give us nothing. The main characters in this
documentary are the co-founding couple who we find
out are Mormons-- not shocked-- give us big
Wendi McLendon-Covey circa Reno 911! energy and Glenn Beck if
he went through the machine in The Fly with a beat. They drop the fact that
they have 14 children-- OK-- and that two of them
are married to each other. Good for them. They also give us a pretty
twisty-turny origin story for the company
that, when contrasted with the actual
depositions that they had to give in some
of their lawsuits, seems to be extremely sus. The wife in the couple
insists that she started this kind of by
accident because people just loved those ugly
skirts she was making. But when you find out shortly
thereafter that both of them, as well as several of
their family members, had long been involved in
various MLMs of their own, you realize that it was
probably a pretty active choice and she knew what
she was doing when she started looping other people
to sell her skirts for her. But no matter how it actually
started, LuLaRoe quickly, between the years of
about 2014 to 2016, exploded in popularity
and growth to the point that they had, at one time,
over 100,000 consultants representing their brand. Those are basically
the freelance retailers who buy the inventory
that they can then not offload because
who the fuck wants to be wearing these leggings? The story arc of
the documentary is one that's not
terribly surprising if you're at all familiar
with any anti-MLM content. And while I did briefly discuss
this phenomenon in my podcast episode with queen of anti-MLM
and general internet culture TiffanyFerg-- love her, highly
recommend you check out that interview-- I think, in light
of this documentary, this particular aspect is
really worth exploring. The couple is framed as
the villains of the story, and it's not surprising why. Everything points to the
idea that they absolutely knew what they were doing. And the fact that they
offloaded about 100% of the important and
actually legitimate jobs to their extremely suspect
and borderline nonfunctional children, you don't really
have any pity for them. And let's be clear. Even while talking about
all of the various lawsuits they're drowning in and cutting
to and from the consultants who are filing for bankruptcy,
the wife DeAnne in this couple is giving her interview while
wearing a pair of signature Valentino heels. So sure, they're
evil, their family's evil, even their
weird nephew for whom we had to suffer both through
a high school musical theater production and him having to
detail the weed Ponzi scheme he tried to rope all of the
former LuLaRoe consultants into, yes, all of them
can go into the garbage. But I found that
this documentary had a similar dynamic
to the one that I experienced while watching
the HBO NXIVM documentary. For those who haven't
seen it, please watch it. It is such an
enjoyable several hours even with all of its flaws. Basically, if we can think about
MLMs through the same prism that we think about
cults, which I think is an extremely apt comparison,
especially when you consider how difficult they make
it for people to leave and how much they insist that
current members never speak to or in any way interact
with former members, we start to see that the
line between who is a victim and who is a predator
is extremely blurry. And like in the
NXIVM documentary where our two protagonists were
people who both clearly got filthy rich by
exploiting and entrapping other young vulnerable women
and aspiring actors, the most exploitable group,
you got the feeling that many of the
women we are watching expose the overall
scheme are themselves nearly as culpable
as the founders, especially when you start
moving up the hierarchy and look at women who made
literally seven figures by roping thousands of
women underneath them. The idea that they
could be framed at some level as whistleblowers
or righteous victims or people speaking truth to
power in some capacity is, quite frankly,
a little offensive. And even as you
move down the line, even the women who had some
of the most compelling stories ultimately made it several
years in the company only by exploiting
and entrapping other women underneath them. And these women were
quick to point out that, hey, I was a single mom. Hey, I was a military spouse. Hey, I wasn't able
to make ends meet, which they use to sort
of amp up their victim status in the dynamic,
but fail to mention that all of the other women that
they knowingly roped into such a losing proposition were in
those exact same situations. In my conversation
with TiffanyFerg, I address the issue that I think
one of the biggest problems and why MLMs continue to
thrive, and in fact, have grown substantially since COVID
is because we refuse to hold accountable so
many of the people who, yes, on some level were
victims, but the day they stayed in the company and started
bringing other people in became just as
culpable perpetrators. There is no shortage of
anti-MLM content out there. Yes, this documentary
is probably one of the biggest and most
splashy examples of the genre and is bound to
reach a lot of people who are outside of
the world of bad shit happening on the
internet, which happens to be my favorite topic. But if you Google essentially
any individual MLM, any of the business practices
or models or just the concept itself, there is an overwhelming
and overwhelmingly available amount of information on
why these things are bad, why you are almost
guaranteed to lose money, and why the only
way you will even be able to hope for
survival financially yourself is by essentially
throwing other vulnerable women under the bus. I mentioned queen TiffanyFerg,
but even lovable chimney sweep John Oliver has done an
entire segment on these. The point is it is 2021. There is no shortage
of information here. And while I understand that
vulnerable people getting roped into dubious
financial schemes is a tale as old
as time, the fact that we continue to extend
victimhood status to people who are essentially The
Ring-ing each other and showing each other the
video that's going to kill them so that they don't get killed
is part of the problem. There are many women in
the documentary who clearly suffered financially but
also are not fucking victims and should honestly be
part of the takedown. And it's tough to
draw the line, right? If you recruit one
unknowing woman into getting roped
into the scheme so you might have a
chance for survival, are you then more of a
perpetrator than a victim? Maybe. If you do it to
hundreds of women, are you more a perpetrator? I would say absolutely, yes. But we really haven't reached
that place in our discourse yet. In doing research for videos
on all kinds of topics like consumerism, internet
culture, or even MLMs, I have an Explore
page on Instagram that is full to the brim of
women who are still to this day engaging in all kinds of
MLM-type organizations. These are women who market
themselves as career coaches or wellness authorities
despite no credentials, or exercise gurus or oracles on
all things organic mommy-dom. The point is the phenomenon
of women at home making money by roping other women into
terrible financial propositions is by no means slowing down. And yet, when you
look in the comments of these various extremely
popular accounts, you'll see that the number of
people who actually take them to task on the realities of what
they're doing to other women with their, quote unquote,
"businesses" is very limited. We've not yet reached a
place in the discourse where we're ready to hold
people accountable who are, yes, at some level, victims,
but also very much in the process of
being predators. You walk away from this
documentary feeling like the real
monsters in this story are the couple and all of
their grotesque children, and maybe, yes, the atrocious
prints on the clothes. But you also walk away giving
a pretty damn free pass to all of the women in this
documentary who knowingly and intentionally perpetrated
this affliction on others. And I submit that the real
reckoning with MLM culture is not going to come until the
people who are midstream, who are presenting
themselves as career coaches and aspirational
startup gurus are being taken to the fucking
mat in their own Instagram comments. Hop on their lives. They can't delete
those in real time. If more people see
this documentary and become aware of the dangers
of MLMs, it's a good thing. But if people see it and
think that this problem is localized to
companies like LuLaRoe or that the singular bad guys in
the narrative are the founders, then we're likely just to keep
seeing this problem growing as it has post-COVID. Those are just my two cents
on what was otherwise a very entertaining documentary. PS, Kelly Clarkson is canceled. As always, guys,
thank you for watching and don't forget to hit
the Subscribe button and to come back every
Monday, Tuesday, and Thursday for new and awesome videos. Goodbye.
